You are here with me now. It's time I take you on a dreamy food adventure. Our trip delivers us to the more remote reaches of the American Southwest, and to deep France and Belgium. But first, a short detour. I am a man who once sought Roubideau. I count food as an engram that appears, disappears and reappears from our memory like a mountain summit in the fog. It's hard to ask yourself, but you know. Somewhere inside, do you remember foods you haven't eaten for eons like baked Clams Casino or the memory of the first mouth watering bite of a real, genuinely sun ripened tomato that was picked deep red and plump right off the vine? (As a child on my parents farm I would take a salt shaker right out into the rows.) Your taste memory cataloged and stored -your moments. I pose the questions. Was all this merely the electrical impulses of the senses, or was it more? I think it's got to go deeper. When was the first time you tasted smoked meat? Was it the first taste of Easter ham or the bacon you were given as a child? Or were your engrams sourcing stored code for smoke+meat? Could that first recorded moment reach back to our ancient ancestors who ate over camp fires 40,000 years ago and its all still locked in your genetics? The blessing is your taste catalog persuasion. It awaits near infinite sensory playback...Welcome to Skin Side Down, The Search for Roubideau in the American Culinary Outback. I've been keeping food journals since an early age. They're personally important to me, and my story is the way I want to share them with you. Oh, as for, Skin Side Down: when sautéing a piece of fish or duck. You've got a fast moving collection of short stories.In our inevitably short, variable subjective lives, with a shared desire to reacquaint ourselves with great emotional food stuffs, a magic place like Roubideau floated in and out of reality, in and out of my own collective consciousness, in and out anywhere else on earth. Like those mountain bends on the road in Midi-Pyrénées France with hidden treasures like perfect trout, tiny goat and sheep cheeses and sips of wine from bottles without labels. In and out of my very own western farmhouse with mud on my boots and glaring dogs at my feet while I made dinner. This novel is about making Roubideau solid and informative for a little while longer - before it disappears for good in the vanishing world. Joseph V. Coniglio - Ides of March 2018
About the Author: Joseph Vincent Leo Coniglio (May 5, 1955 - ) an American novelist born at Niagara Falls, New York. With the passage of time, he has become an entire school unto himself for food journalists. It is a style that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Joe Coniglio. Mr. Coniglio is an open minded connoisseur of food and drink. Mr. Coniglio enjoys telling great stories and sharing his own authentic recipes. His interpersonal point of view will make enlightened reading. It's a good ride. The campaign is a distant one, past the outer limits of mainstream USA. It's a lonely path outside the comfort zone of most armchair food and travel novelists. His quest for discovery is powerful. "Coniglio pries stones the size of boulders making sure nothing goes unturned. He stands on wind blown bedrock and peers into the cracks and crevasses below and finds life. He hears sweet running water, singing birds and touches the tops of trees." (Anonymous). Joseph shares with his followers a direct writing style that appeals to women and men and delves into the human condition; mostly his own. Skin Side Down is a fun read, gentle and elegant at times or discourteously blunt and base, but always informative, reaching into the readers subliminal emotional and visceral fabric. Coniglio provides a magicians pitchblende of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reduction, surrealist free association and mysticism. Joseph might stir in a honeymoon lunch in Paris; deal kindly with a shy Yeti in frozen desolation over a bowl of tripe; shop the farmers markets of France; welcome cold war demons alongside the Soviets; sit down to the Seven Fishes; digging fence posts with the ghosts of Chinese laborers; walk the high wire act at Niagara Falls; or finds himself standing in his farm kitchen to the sounds of silence of intensely dining guests. His admiring dogs glaring by his feet. Every story comes with plenty of food and drink. Coniglio will keep you fueled with the images, flavors and aromas of his world. Your yearning will be quenched. His fiction possesses more than the mere kernel of truth with core accuracy deep at the heart. Or, one could say his style contains fictitious plausible constructions that will become future truths. His writing style is rich and colorful. [1] His most characteristic work of this kind is SKIN SIDE DOWN, THE SEARCH FOR ROUBIDEAU IN THE AMERICAN CULINARY OUTBACK; Revised First Edition. (c)2012-2018 Port of the Moon Press.